Wednesday, August 05, 2015

concept paper (rough draft) - Linguistic and Cultural Issues of Developing Nations

Concept paper for the International Seminar on
Linguistic and Cultural Issues of Developing Nations
A seminar to commemorate the 125th birth anniversary of
Professor Suniti Kumar Chatterji

India, along with many other developing nations in today’s world, face many common linguistic and socio cultural issues. Such nations are almost always diverse with different kinds of social groups. They differ in terms of religion, castes, and creeds, cultures and customs, languages and beliefs, etc. This diversity may harbour different challenges of the nations. There may be problems of unity because of this cultural diversity. It may harbour discordant social patterns. Also there are arguments that the extreme diversity and traditional cultural practices  may hinder economic growth. Besides most of the new developing nations have been former colonies of developed countries. This brings in issues of the influence of a dominant culture and language. The pattern of resource distribution among linguistic and cultural groups, the role and choice of language in education etc. The choices made by the policy makers on such issues have great impact on language maintenance and death, language conflicts, attitude of the individuals and the communities towards different languages.

We are celebrating the 125th birth anniversary of the doyen of Indian Linguistics, Professor Suniti Kumar Chatterji this year. His magnum opus the Origin and Development of Bengali Language is a chef d’oeuvre of modern linguistics. His interests went beyond linguistics and was wide and all encompassing.  He has written extensively on diverse cultural, educational and social issues. He was a member of the upper house of the legislative body of West Bengal and has spoken and written considerably on various issues related to language politics and language policy. For this, we believe that a true tribute to this great scholar would be organise a discussion on language and cultural issues of developing countries.

objective of the seminar
 In this seminar, we aim to bring together scholars from diverse discipline working on language, politics and history of different developing nations to bring in their output on related issues. We hope to bring in celebrated scholars from the Asian subcontinent with published research on the theme of the seminar. Through the lectures and discussions on the given issue, we may get a clear understanding of the root of the problems in this area and the best possible way of handling them.

target participants

 we plan to invite established scholars working on sociolinguistic issue from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India as speakers for in depth discussion of issues in general and  pertaining to these countries in particular.  In the audience, we plan to bring together scholars of language and cultural issues from Kolkata and around.